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Topic: VDR Setup (Read 12256 times)

Can anyone point me in the right direction on how to setup VDR in the new bate3.

How you go about tuning and setting up the channels?

Also it says in the info on the release that VDR is now included with support for some Dvb-s cards. Is there support for dvb-c cards? Specifically will the TechnoTrend TT1500 card I have now working in mythtv sort of.

Can anyone point me in the right direction on how to setup VDR in the new bate3.

How you go about tuning and setting up the channels?

Also it says in the info on the release that VDR is now included with support for some Dvb-s cards. Is there support for dvb-c cards? Specifically will the TechnoTrend TT1500 card I have now working in mythtv sort of.

Any info while im waiting for the torrent to download would be great.

Regards

You just select VDR instead of MythTV as the PVR software in the Setup Wizard then go Web Admin -> Advanced -> Configuration -> VDR Setup then choose the 'TV Service' from the pop-up. Alternatively if you have access to a vdr compliant channels.conf you can use the 'Upload Custom File' button to load that instead.

If you have the TT-1500 DVB-C card working and you did not have to hand install any modules/firmware under 7.04 then it will probably work in Beta3... if it doesn't then it wll be just a matter of modprob'ing the correct modules into place and doing the same for any firmware.

Below are the target DVB cards we aim to support in the initial release (support for some of these may be missing from Beta3);

Totallymaxed - I did get the NovaT500 that we discussed. Below, when you say "just needs firmware" what does this mean? What do I need to do beyond the description below about the admin web site?

Hi Colin,

Sorry I pasted that list of cards in from an email about the cards we needed to support... so that reference was to remind myself and the Pluto devs what the vdr packaging needed to support for each card.

So as of Beta3 the T500... just works as the firmware is installed and card is configured for you ;-)

You will need to provide a channels.conf file for the local terrestrial transmitter your T500 will be tuned to in your location. The current Beta3 only has some of those for Europe built in and accessible from the pop-up in VDR Setup... even the UK ones are not in there for example.

Below is an example of the channels.conf we use here in the UK for the London Crystal Palace transmitter;

OK, got it - but presumably it can still be instructed to scan and create this itself without the conf file? I don't fancy trying to find an existing conf file for my area in Sydney, especially as I am receiving from at least half a dozen transmitters in various locations....

OK, got it - but presumably it can still be instructed to scan and create this itself without the conf file? I don't fancy trying to find an existing conf file for my area in Sydney, especially as I am receiving from at least half a dozen transmitters in various locations....

Col

You can use the normal DVB scan utils to generate a vdr compliant channels.conf for your chosen transmitters in Sydney.

I had to stop vdr manually which dont seem to have caused any problems and I had to use the initial scan file I created for kaffeine for use with scan but after that is scanned fine. Uploaded the file scan created via the web interface and rebooted machine. Now when I click tv it loads vdr and starts showing the first channel.

However I dont seem to be able to change channels or do anything. I have tried the remote and with the keyboard to no avail.I can bring the mce menu's up while in livetv, I can goto guide and it brings up a screen in vdr with 1 schedule, 2 channels, 3 timers etc but I cannot select any of these.

I had to stop vdr manually which dont seem to have caused any problems and I had to use the initial scan file I created for kaffeine for use with scan but after that is scanned fine. Uploaded the file scan created via the web interface and rebooted machine. Now when I click tv it loads vdr and starts showing the first channel.

However I dont seem to be able to change channels or do anything. I have tried the remote and with the keyboard to no avail.I can bring the mce menu's up while in livetv, I can goto guide and it brings up a screen in vdr with 1 schedule, 2 channels, 3 timers etc but I cannot select any of these.

Any ideas would be a great help

Regards

Hi again...

Sorry for the slow replies today;

Ok the lmcevdr intergartion in Beta3 is somewhat unfinished I'm afraid... so there are still some UI2 screens and integration work to add. These are still being tested and will either be in the next beta or will possibly made available as an update you can install by hand.

For now you can get a glimpse of the new UI2 interface to lmcevdr by selecting 'TV' so that you have a live picture on screen. Now press 'F6' on the keyboard... you will see the 'cross' control on the screen... hit 'IP' on the remote and then 'OK'... now you will see the new UI2 EPG for vdr... in this screen you can use up/down in the left most column to select you channel... as you do this you will see that the centre column updates with the currently highlighted channels program listing for the day... if you select 'right' then you can move up/down the program listing for that channel... as you do that you will see the panel in the top right hand corner of the screen update to show the currently highlighted programs info. Some of the controls for setting recordings etc are partly working in the bottom right panel... give those a try....

I have installed dvbutils, but can't get scan to work for me. The redirect to channels.conf produces permissions errors even when sudo'ing.

Which folder should I run this from. Have found the link in /etc/vdr to somewhere in /var, and just /vdr under root, but all seem to have permissions issues with the redirect. When I drop the redirect and use the file name as a straight parameter, this seems to start and it goes through all those EU stations in the default file, but gives some kind of parsing error and at the end says ERROR: initial tuning failed \ dumping lists (0 services) \ done....

BTW - I am having to SIGTERM the vdr process because I can't work out how to stop it, it stops and regenerates after a short while and this seems to release the adapter just long enough to get these errors!

Just don't seem to be able to get scan to work - comes up with parse errors for the conf file. Google doesn't render anything interesting on this error message except that others also have had it, but no solutions.

I have confirmed that the card is working by using mplayer dvb://"blah" against the channels.conf file after copying it into ~/.mplayer/ - I can watch TV stations indicated by their name in that file. But the same file just doesn't want to play with scan.

I am now trying Kaffine as Fibres suggested - it finally recognises that I have a DVB card and I am trying the autoscans, hopefully I can also create a functional .conf file. But the autoscan doesn't seem to find anything yet - I can see the signal bar jump up every so often but now channels get listed....

You mentioned support for a few boards, I havn't really followed too much of the VDR stuff so forgive me if you may have answer this already.... but doesn't VDR work with any DVB source? I thought if you have a /dev/dvb entry then VDR would be happy with that. Is there extra support needed?

Also, Is there a good MythTV/VDR comparison somewhere that you can point us at. Not specifically for linuxMCE, just as general PVRs.

I have managed to get scan to work after messing around for a while. I finally got Kaffine to detect and tune my stations - but only based on its included au/sydney preconfigured file. Once that was done, I went into Kaffine's config folder under the linuxmce profile and copied the file out.

I still can't do scan -o vdr > channels.conf, it just creates an empty file and errors out and if that happens to be the name of the file I got from Kaffine (it was originally) it overwrites it and you loose it - I think that is what Fibres had a problem with.

But I tried scan -o vdr channels.tmp > channels.conf where channels.tmp is what I called the file from Kaffine, and this seemed to work - certainly it scanned, and detected "running" TV stations and created an output file. Problem is, I don't know where to put this output file so that VDR sees it. I tried /etc/vdr and /vdr/vdrsettings where there were existing files which I renamed. I rebooted, but VDR still says no signal and when i hit F6 the channel list is still the European one...

What am I doing wrong? Why won't scan parse the example file so that I have to use Kaffine - certainly Kaffine outputs a scan compatible file, but I don't seem to be able to get VDR to use it.... getting confused now!